IE 7: Finally, Something to Write Home About

“When eWEEK Labs looked at Internet Explorer 6.0 more than five years ago, we were so disappointed in the browser that we said the only reason to upgrade to it was because it was free. That means you’d have to go back nearly nine years to find a release of the Microsoft browser that we found to be significant: IE 5.0. But with the release Oct. 18 of Internet Explorer 7, Microsoft is finally back in the Web browser game in a serious way: IE 7 takes major strides in reversing Microsoft’s neglect of the flagship browser.” And, surprise.

We do. At our office we have a bunch of macs and a couple of linux desktops. We develop web sites, therefore we need to check our sites in IE6 (and now even IE7). Luckily we have a windows box in the corner for remoting. :/

First off I’d imagine Firefox bugs are much more visable due to Firefox’s open nature. But just for the sake of argument let’s say that Firefox is 100 times buggier than IE. I’ll still feel 100 times safer running Firefox on OpenSuse as opposed to running IE on Windows. IE on Windows is just so much more of a target. But hey, it’s your data. Do what you want.

“Originally planned to have the 1.6 engine branch in version 2.0, this was abandoned as it would delay the release, meaning that Firefox 2 will have the same engine as 1.5. The Reflow branch has been developed further than the original 1.6 branch, and now passes the Acid 2 test, making it the fifth browser to do so. This branch is not yet in any public releases, and although it can be compiled from the CVS source, it is certainly nowhere near ready for public use yet (images fail to appear on many pages, several form inputs do not work, layout does not cope with resizing, and parts of the page or interface may appear and disappear). It will probably become part of the Firefox 3 release (once the regressions are fixed).”

“Originally planned to have the 1.6 engine branch in version 2.0, this was abandoned as it would delay the release, meaning that Firefox 2 will have the same engine as 1.5. The Reflow branch has been developed further than the original 1.6 branch, and now passes the Acid 2 test, making it the fifth browser to do so. This branch is not yet in any public releases, and although it can be compiled from the CVS source, it is certainly nowhere near ready for public use yet (images fail to appear on many pages, several form inputs do not work, layout does not cope with resizing, and parts of the page or interface may appear and disappear). It will probably become part of the Firefox 3 release (once the regressions are fixed).”

There are some venom spitting, spotty, 15 year olds sitting in their mothers basement, on her Dell, who think the – and + buttons are for statements they either agree or disagree with.

The “living in one’s parents’ basement” argument only applies to those that should’ve already moved out. It is perfectly appropriate for a 15 year old to still be living at home, using resources provided by their legal guardian(s).

That’s an understatement, I dare say. None-the-less it shows IE7 is quite behind FF1.5 in regard to standard compliance – on the other hand, none of the browsers are excellent, so one may wonder about the accuracy of the stats, as well as wonder about the need for supporting the newest and the oldest standards, and the least used possibilities.

IE7 seems to render most webpages quite well, so the lacking compliance doesn’t seem to be that much of a problem.

IE7 seems to render most webpages quite well, so the lacking compliance doesn’t seem to be that much of a problem.

I’m sure most webpages treat it just like IE6, and the backwards compatibility is good enough that they aren’t broken. IE7 is way behind the others in standards compliance, but it is hard for me to tell exactly how far that is. The CSS specs are enormous, and most of them are hardly ever used. Nevertheless, I think there is a clear consensus among web developers that they are still going to have to create a specific IE path that is seperate from another that would pretty much work on all the others.

IE7 was intended as the new bowser for vista, but as we are all aware it slipped and slipped.

Its not good enough. The article actually annoyed me.

Summary:-

tabs

rss

anti-phishing

cleaner interface

“Finally, Something to Write Home About”. I think not; its a disgrace. 5 years for this from a company with 70,000 employees vs the like of Firefox and opera.

The other side of the coin has become for most people why switch to Firefox its so similar to them.

I believe that IE8 will be wow, because it will have to be, Firefox 2.0 is a good improvement but has no “this is better” or even worth switching to from IE7. The article says it all; 9 years and the innovation is a cleaner interface; tabs; rss; anti-phishing no wonder everyone is talking about web 2.0

I had a problem with the tabs not appearing as a right click option after installing IE7,

after trying a few things I finally reset the browser (internet options/advanced/reset) and it removed the google toolbar I had installed back in IE6 days.. Once done, the tabs work when i right click !

I had a problem with the tabs not appearing as a right click option after installing IE7,

after trying a few things I finally reset the browser (internet options/advanced/reset) and it removed the google toolbar I had installed back in IE6 days.. Once done, the tabs work when i right click !

Strange…. I have the Google toolbar installed, and it’s not causing any problems with IE7. I’ve got tabs & everything.

The download manager in Firefox doesn’t work; press pause, and it doesn’t actually pause it, try to restart it and it starts from the beginning again.

Internet Explorer 7 did have a download manager, but they pulled it because it wasn’t ready – the litmus test as to whether Microsoft is actually going to maintain it for the long term is how quickly they get IE 7.x and 8.x out the door; if they take another year, its not good enough, if they release it within 6months of releasing Windows Vista, they’re on the ball.

Microsoft has no excuses, it has 50billion and thousands of programmers; it is crap management and crap leadership, coupled with beacratic bungling than anything to do with ‘programming Windows is complex’.

IE7 might be a good browser, but I’m pretty much “locked-in” to Firefox extensions at this stage of the game. Couple that with it only being windows and that I’ve heard that Firefox 2.0 has some nice speed and memory consumption improvements.

But I am looking forward to WPF/E. It’s the “flash killer” that should be (should have already) coming to developers as a beta soon. It’ll be cross-browser and cross-OS. If the browser is going to be a major applications platform, I’d like to have an engine that is n’t as clunky and messy as the stock HTML/CSS/Javascript.

Other than tabbed browsing, IE6 had all the features that 95% of the masses really ever needed. And most of them didn’t even need tabbed browsing. Anybody interested in features galore and wants to use the IE rendering engine will probably use browsers like Maxthon and its ilk, as they are probably already doing. Most of the people I switched to Firefox still couldn’t tell you what tabbed browsing is, even though I showed it to them when first installed.

All MS really needed to do was plug the security holes, and I suppose only time will tell if the succeeded at this. The only reason the majority of users who flocked to Firefox did so was because of security concerns.

Sure, a few of us switched for the features (such as tabbed browsing and adblock), but the reason why the majority of my friends and family switched because I insisted on it, due to security concerns. A lot of these systems I upgraded myself because I cared about the users’ security. But if IE6 didn’t have more holes than swiss cheese, I never would’ve bothered to switch them, and they never would’ve bothered to switch. It got annoying to get those late night phone calls asking such questions as, “Hey, why can’t I view videos on Launchcast?” Because of people like me who will no longer be interested in maintaining Firefox installs,If IE7 proves to be decent on security, I’m guessing Firefox usage will slip.

These articles, and loads of blog posts appear in packs during the last months and keep coming, most of them bragging about the novelties and the newly found superiority of IE7. Those who try to keep a bit of a distance and look more closely what IE7 really has in itself, come to the conclusion (myself included) that IE7 has absolutely no feature that about any other browser doesn’t have, and most of these features are much better realized in other browsers. In seurity elements, in anti-phishing, in content zooming, in interface and gui, in reliability, in speed, in plugins and extensions, in customization. I won’t even mention standards, since the average crowds couldn’t care less about them, but I expect most of the OSNews reader base knows about IE7’s “capabilities” regarding CSS2+, DOM2, XHTML, Javascript, etc.

Usually I don’t care if some people prefer one product over the others and try to advocate it for the masses. But there’s so much bullcrap I can take after I got fed up.

I didn’t install IE 7 on main systems yet but on a couple of VM, on which I’m using IE 6 as standalone browser now.

Apart from the browser itself, my main concern is tests I did on final version show that IE7 doesn’t render websites like IE6 (obiuvsly) neither like FF or Opera so this means I need to support another major revision in my code. Pfff… I’m not happy about this, actually.

This is partially mitigated by the fact Microsoft is pushing IE7 to customers via automatic update which will make IE7 adoption rate quite high (two of my Windows2003 systems already had IE7 waiting to be installed yesterday…) however, given IE6 huge market share, it will surely take a while for IE7 to replace it and in the meanwhile I need to support both editions. More work… pfff….

Dial-up connections will be slow in updating but anyway we have millions of PCs which are connected by xDSL connections and we have server installations too.

Consider Italy, for example: we have over 7,5millions xDSL connections on a 22millions userbase. That means that 1 out of 3 PC will be updated (yeah, not all of them are runinng WinXP or Win2003 but it’s safe to estimate 90% of them will be updated).

If you consider servers (Wind2003 installations), IE 7 could gather 1/3 of IE 6 userbase in a few weeks. Of course, dial-up connections will be slower to upgrade but a good part of them are occasional Internet users who don’t care that much about this.

Just not quite so directly yet, so I’ll state it here. The reason it sucks that IE is not standards compliant, is that it means that web developers have to put in more code and work into their websites to make sure it works with everyone’s browsers.

Of course if it were up to Microsoft, they’d want websites to only display properly in IE anyhow. It’s the same thing with everything that Microsoft does. They’d rather have a closed document format that only displays properly in their word processor, etc.

It’s crap that for example, if you want transparent menus in a website you have to use a different line for Firefox, IE and even older Mozilla builds. Maybe now even a different one for IE7.

The web was created as a standard, so that any website should appear the exact same no matter what program you would use to look at it. But since not all browsers are created equally under the hood, then this doesn’t happen.

The fact that there IS a group that puts out the specifications of how things should be coded makes it entirely the fault of the Browser programmers themselves.

“Of course, as soon as Fx became standards-compliant, all the big sites would be unusable (including most of Google).”

Not true, unless for some reason the new versions forget about backward compatibility. Standards-compliant doesn’t mean that there can be only one way of doing things. They can be standards-compliant as well as retaining the ability to handle older, deprecated code. That’s what’s more likely.

The first thing I noticed is that overall it seemed slower than IE6 viewing the exact same web sites. Long pauses before pages where rendered. Very long pauses on long web pages (Slashdot) and that it didn’t render articles on Slashdot correctly – text overlapping itself something awful.

So, while it may be more standards compliant, it has gone backwards in usability.

IE 5 was released late enough to support CSS2. IE 7 only marginally supports CSS2 and supports NO PROPERTIES missing from IE 6, as well as not repairing the HTML tags IE 6 breaks badly (BUTTON, for example) or removing incorrect CSS implementations (text-align:center aligning block-level elements instead of their contents). So, no, it isn’t everything IE 5 should have been.

I honestly must say, I do _not_ like the IE7 interface, at all. I think it’s poorly designed; IE6 looks beautiful in comparison. The only reason I like IE (though I don’t use it ever) is because it’s got a faster rendering engine, and uses less resources, than FF.